This week’s mystery movie has been the 1952 Columbia picture “Affair in Trinidad,” with Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, Alexander Scourby, Valerie Bettis, Torin Thatcher, Howard Wendell, Karel Stepanek, George Voskovec, Steven Geray, Walter Kohler, Juanita Moore. The screenplay was by Oscar Saul and James Gunn, from a story by Virginia Van Upp and Bernie Giler, photography by Joseph Walker, art direction by Walter Holscher, set decoration by William Kiernan. The movie was produced and directed by Vincent Sherman. Dances for Miss Hayworth created by Valerie Bettis.

Los Angeles Times, Dec. 14, 1951: Hayworth was suspended by Columbia for 10 days after she refused to report for work. Hayworth said she hadn’t seen a complete script, but the studio replied that she did not have script approval. Hayworth remained unhappy about “Trinidad.” Hedda Hopper reported (June 27, 1952) that Hayworth cried when she saw the picture and noted that Hayworth “doesn’t enjoy playing a bad character on the screen.”

Writing in the New York Times (July 31, 1952) Bosley Crowther said:

Outside of its celebration of the return of Rita Hayworth to the screen—an occurrence almost as momentous as the birth of a new camel at the zoo—there is little to endow with distinction that lady’s and Columbia’s new film, “Affair in Trinidad,” which took its shoes off and settled down at the Victoria yesterday.

In the first place, this tepid fiction, which Berne Giler and Virginia Van Upp have indifferently and cheerlessly concocted from a lot of obvious spy-thriller clichés, becomes as apparent and monotonous as a phonograph record on which the needle is stuck before it has traveled half the distance of the hour and forty minutes that it runs.

The film opened in Los Angeles on Aug. 6, 1952. Los Angeles Times movie critic Edwin Schallert, writing the next day, said:

With appropriate smoothness and efficiency along well-mapped lines, the return of Rita Hayworth to the screen is accomplished in “Affair in Trinidad.” Columbia Studio brings its long-absent feminine star back in a suspense melodrama, with tropic background, and an unquestioned family resemblance to her popular success “Gilda.”

I don’t know who this is, but unless it’s an unusual movie for the time period, the person probably had a small role. I notice these small-part actors a lot more now that I’ve seen Lynn Nottage’s play, “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” which was inspired by Theresa Harris and other Hollywood actors of color who were always relegated to the background.